Over at Grasping Reality: Weekend Reading: Francis Fukuyama (2006): After Neoconservatism

<http://www.bradford-delong.com/2015/05/weekend-reading-francis-fukuyama-after-neoconservatism.html>

“How did the neoconservatives end up overreaching to such an extent that they risk undermining their own goals?…

…Four common… threads ran through… [Neoconservative] thought… a concern with democracy, human rights and, more generally, the internal politics of states; a belief that American power can be used for moral purposes; a skepticism about the ability of international law and institutions to solve serious security problems; and finally, a view that ambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and thereby undermines its own ends…. The skeptical stance toward ambitious social engineering… [was] applied… to domestic policies like affirmative action, busing and welfare…. The belief in the potential moral uses of American power… [called for] American activism… [to] reshape the structure of global politics….

[Neoconservatism] did not have to develop this way…. [The] largely Jewish intellectuals who attended City College of New York… Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer and, a bit later, Daniel Patrick Moynihan… a documentary film by Joseph Dorman called ‘Arguing the World’… an idealistic belief in social progress and the universality of rights, coupled with intense anti-Communism. It is not an accident that many in the C.C.N.Y. group started out as Trotskyites…